No Data Corruption & Data Integrity

Discover what No Data Corruption & Data Integrity is and how it can be beneficial for the files within your website hosting account.

Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software failures. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on larger hard disks where significant volumes of info are located. If a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers today often are not able to locate corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems do not include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from another disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption as all of our storage servers work with the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be placed on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, so if it discovers a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers will not get corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some malfunction, extending the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.